


Sorry, Who Are You?

by squirenonny



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (aka face-blindness), (because I cannot write allistic Keith to save my life), Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Autistic Keith (Voltron), M/M, Prosopagnosia, in other words: Keith is me and I am Keith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-14 21:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9203204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: When Keith was seven years old, he spent a year in La Quinta with a boy named Lance, the best friend he ever had. Ten years later, Lance and Keith reunite at the Garrison--only Keith doesn't remember who Lance is.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Piper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piper/gifts).



> Part of the Voltron Secret Santa exchange on Tumblr! This is a gift for Piper, who asked for a childhood friends Klance. I hope you like it! :)
> 
> Update 6/15/2018: [@stellar-collapse](https://stellar-collapse.tumblr.com/) has translated this fic into Russian! You can find that version [here](https://ficbook.net/readfic/6985921)!

Keith moved to La Quinta when he was seven years old. His mother had been dead for less than a year and he’d already gotten himself removed from his first foster home. La Quinta, his social worker had said, was a fresh start. A new home, a happier home.

Keith wasn’t entirely sure he believed the woman, with her hair pulled back into a bun and her trim smile that seemed to Keith to be a lie. He wasn’t sure he believed that anything happy could happen out in a desert as hot and dry as a furnace.

But he was willing to try. Had to try. He’d messed up at the last home, been too difficult, been too overwhelmed by the touches and the questions and the way the Hollises did everything _wrong_. His mother had put cinnamon in his pancakes and vanilla in his hot chocolate, and they’d passed a familiar old crooked elm on the way to the store that was as much _home_ as the well-worn carpet in their living room.

The Hollis house had no carpets, just linoleum that was always either cold as ice or sticky with the summer heat. They didn’t put anything in the hot chocolate, and they put fruit in the pancakes, and there were no elm trees, crooked or not, anywhere near their house.

Keith hadn’t meant to be a problem, but it was too much. The changes. The constant interrogation of _what’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite food? What sorts of clothes do you like? Do you want to watch TV? Do you want to play a game? Do you know how to make your bed? Do you want to come to the grocery store with us?_ (And not all the questions were questions, he’d discovered.)

It all made him want to cry, but Keith didn’t like to cry, and he especially didn’t like it when his foster parents tried to hug him and whisper in his ears, their breath hot and wet on his neck, their words lifting his hair and making it brush against his ear.

They said he threw tantrums. They said he was too much work, and maybe another family would be better. Maybe another family that didn’t already have two children who were much better behaved than Keith.

La Quinta was a new start.

Keith told himself that over and over again as he met his new foster parents—Kim and Brian Rhodes—and settled into the cozy two-bedroom house. There wasn’t really a yard here. Or there was, but instead of green grass it was mostly dried brown stuff scattered over a bed of sun-bleached dirt.

He reminded himself, again, that this was a new start, and that new starts were _good_ , as Kim walked him up the steps of the La Quinta Elementary School to meet his new class.

They were all nice enough, he supposed, a sea of seven-year-old smiles and overlapping greetings that twisted Keith up with nerves. The teacher pointed him toward an empty desk near the windows and turned for a quiet conversation with Kim Rhodes.

The kid in the desk in front of Keith’s shot a look at the grown-ups, squirmed briefly in his seat, then turned and crossed his hands on the back of his chair. His skin was a warm brown that didn’t look quite so out of place in the California sun as Keith’s pasty paleness, and a wide, lopsided grin split his face.

“So did you just move here or something?”

Keith blinked, hooking his toes over the crossbar beneath his chair. “Yeah.”

“That your mom?” The kid jerked his head toward Kim Rhodes.

Keith frowned, not sure quite how to answer that. “Yeah,” he said, because that was easier than explaining how his mom had died, how his last foster mom hadn’t wanted him, how he’d only known Kim Rhodes for a week.

The kid tilted his head to the side and squinted at Keith. “You don’t look like her,” he said, and Keith shrank a little inside, wishing the day could be over already. “You must take after your dad.”

Keith looked up, frowning, thinking about how he’d never known his father, so he wouldn’t know if he took after him.

He didn’t say that, either.

“What?”

The kid shrugged, a motion that seemed to involve his whole body. “I dunno. Mom said that to one of my friends.” He lifted his chin off his crossed arms and held his hand out to Keith to shake. “I’m Lance. What’s your name?”

“Keith.”

The way Lance smiled, Keith thought that maybe a new start wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

* * *

Some days Lance could hardly believe he’d made it here. The Galaxy Garrison, top flight school in the world. (Also a pseudo-military training program, but who was counting? Lance was here to fly, and—hopefully, eventually—go to space.)

Only some days, though. The rest of the time he figured it had been a gimme. The Garrison would have had to mess up pretty bad to not admit Lance McClain, pilot prodigy.

And the fact that Lance was currently stuck a half a point shy of a spot in the elite fighter pilot class was just a temporary hiccup on his path to fame, glory, and lots and lots of fangirls. ( _Temporary_ being the key word. These were just the preliminary results from their entrance exams. Assignments weren’t final until the summer exam results came back at the beginning of second year and squads were assigned. Lance would find a way into the fighter pilot class by then, no sweat.)

He was still standing in the hallway, staring up at the preliminary result postings along with half his class, when a familiar name at the very top of the fighter pilot class caught his eye.

_Keith Kogane._

For a half a second, Lance’s mind went blank. There was no way… It couldn’t be the _same_ Keith Kogane, could it? From La Quinta?

A slow smile burst across Lance’s face and he turned to scan the crowd of pilot hopefuls choking the hallway. There were two dozen pilot candidates in his class—competing for five fighter pilot spots and ten cargo pilot spots—and nearly all of them were here now.

Lance ignored them all and looked for the familiar head of dark hair and perpetual scowl that covered a mischievous gleam in his eye. No. No. Not him either.

_Oh my god._

It was him. Keith. _Lance’s_ Keith, who had only stayed in La Quinta for a year before disappearing to the great barren nothingness beyond the city limits. Lance hadn’t seen him in almost ten years; he was several feet taller, even more sour-looking than Lance remembered, and he had a _mullet_ of all things.

But it was him.

All but singing with excitement, Lance shoved his way through the crowd toward Keith.

“Keith!” he called. “Hey! Keith! What are you doing here?”

Keith turned, frowning, and regarded Lance with something like suspicion. Lance waited for the light of recognition to go off in his eyes, but… nothing.

Keith’s scowl deepened. “Who are you?”

The words hit Lance like a sucker punch to the heart and he slowed, smile faltering. “Lance,” he said, leaning forward expectantly. “Lance McClain?” He waited, holding his breath.

“Okay,” said Keith, clearly impatient. “What do you want?”

It shouldn’t have hurt so much. They’d been seven, and it had only been a year, and Lance had never been starved for childhood friendships (even if none of them were quite as _right_ as what he’d had with Keith). If Keith had forgotten him, so what? They could still be friends.

But just then, Lance wasn’t feeling quite so generous. Fine, so it had been ten years ago. They’d also been _best friends_ , and Keith shouldn’t have forgotten it. Showed how much _he’d_ cared.

Scowling, Lance crossed his arms and gave Keith the best glare he could muster. “Just wanted to give you a warning,” he said, pouring all his cockiness and condescension into the words. “You’re going down, Kogane. This time next year, _I’ll_ be the fighter pilot and _you’ll_ be out on the street.”

“Right.” Keith scoffed, then turned away. “Good luck with that.”

* * *

Keith was bad with names.

And faces.

He arrived at his second day of second grade only slightly less nervous than the first day, quietly slid into his assigned seat, and proceeded to stare at his completed worksheet in awkward silence.

The kid who sat ahead of him turned around, grinning. “Hi, Keith!”

“Hi, um...” Keith hesitated. He tried not to make it obvious he was staring at the other boy, trying to disentangle his face from the twenty other faces of new classmates who had all, at the teacher’s insistence, made an effort to welcome Keith to the class. But the kid in the seat in front of him had put in more effort than most. They’d talked about Keith’s parents, kind of. They’d also spent recess together and sat together at lunch while the other boy rambled on about Pokemon and Star Wars and Star Trek.

And Keith couldn’t for the life of him remember this kid’s name.

Thankfully, he didn’t seem offended. “Lance,” he supplied, altogether too chipper for this early in the morning.

“Right,” Keith said, repeating the name to himself a few times. _Lance._ He wasn’t going to forget it this time. “Hi, Lance.”

Lance’s smile, if possible, grew even brighter. He glanced over his shoulder at the teacher, who was still busy getting things set up for the day, then dug through his bag. “Hey. Hey, Keith. I got something for you.”

“For… me?”

“Yup.” Lance’s tongue poked out between his lips as he dug around in the bottom of his book bag. Eventually, with a cry of triumph, he withdrew his hand and flourished an action figure of a pointy-eared man in a blue shirt.

When Lance shoved the action figure across the gap between their desks, Keith took it, feeling a little bit flustered. He wasn’t used to getting gifts except on his birthday and Christmas, and it was several months to either of those. “What… is it?” he asked carefully.

“Spock!” Lance pulled out a similar looking action figure, this one of a man in yellow. “He goes with Captain Kirk, but you can have him if you want.”

Lance looked so hopeful that Keith nodded, quietly lifting the Spock action figure up to look at it more closely. “Is this a Star Wars thing?”

“Star _Trek_ ,” Lance said, a little more sharply than Keith thought was really necessary. He’d never seen either, but he knew they were both about people in space. How different could they be, really? “You really _don’t_ know about Star Trek, do you?”

“No.” Keith hunched his shoulders and pulled the Spock action figure closer to him, suddenly afraid Lance might take it back.

But Lance was far too busy playing with his own toy to notice. He walked Kirk across Keith’s desk toward him. “That’s okay,” he said, distracted. “You’ll just have to come over and watch it with me.”

The way he said it, offhand, like _of course_ Keith would be coming over to Lance’s house sooner or later, startled Keith, and he gaped at Lance for several long seconds before the teacher clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention.

Keith hid his new Spock action figure in his backpack for the rest of class, and when he got home he set it on the shelf over his bed where he could always see it. He figured Lance’s not-really offer would never go anywhere, but within a week Lance showed up at school bouncing on his toes and asked Keith if he wanted to come over Saturday and watch Star Trek.

“Really?” Keith asked.

Lance nodded eagerly.

“O-okay, then,” Keith said. “I’ll have to ask--” He caught himself before he called Kim and Brian by their first names. “I’ll have to ask my parents first.”

“Of course,” Lance said, nodding solemnly. But a grin broke through this mask, and he launched into a description of his house and Star Trek and his baby brother, who had just turned two, and his baby sister, who was only two months old.

Keith listened with half an ear until class started, and spent the rest of the day hoping Kim and Brian would let him go over to Lance’s house.

* * *

Lance was able to convince himself he was happy when Keith got expelled. With the top of the herd thinned out, Lance clinched a coveted fighter pilot spot without any trouble (or at least without any more than he could handle.) He got his squad assignment—his best friend Hunk and Pidge, who was okay enough, if a little anti-social.

It wasn’t hard to ignore the rumors that Keith had seemed seriously depressed and given up on all his classes before he was officially kicked out. After all, the rumors that he’d gotten in a fist fight with Iverson and broken a simulator with a baseball bat were repeated _far_ more often.

Harder to ignore was the guilt churning in his stomach. He and Keith had been friends once, _best_ friends. If Keith was going through something bad enough to get him kicked out of the Garrison, shouldn’t Lance have at least _tried_ to help?

Except that Keith still had no freaking clue who Lance was. A year at the Garrison together, sitting in the same classes, taking the same basic flight skills classes, competing for the same spot among the fighter pilots, passing each other in the halls, exchanging words, with Lance dropping hints here and there to try to jog Keith’s memory…

All he’d ever gotten were blank looks. Or worse yet, no looks at all. Keith barely even knew Lance existed.

“Sorry, who are you?”

Okay, scratch that. Keith _didn’t_ even know Lance existed.

You’d think breaking into a Garrison quarantine tent to rescue the legendary Takashi Shirogane would have jogged Kogane’s memory, but apparently not. No, as far as _Keith_ was concerned, Lance was just some _cargo pilot_.

So, yeah. Lance was bitter. And petty. And not at all hurt. (Nope, not one bit.)

In retrospect, pretending not to remember what Keith had called their _bonding moment_ maybe hadn’t been the greatest way to get Keith to remember that year in La Quinta.

It _had_ , however, been intensely satisfying to see the same spark of hurt and disappointment dim the glow of happiness and relief in Keith’s eyes. So what if Keith had actually been worried about him? So what if Lance had enjoyed—and prolonged—the arm-cradling that had happened after Sendak’s defeat?

If Keith had really cared, he would have remembered second grade.

* * *

Lance’s house was many things. Loud and warm and bright, but in a way that didn’t make Keith want to curl up under a blanket and cry. Lance’s sister was always crying and his brother knew only a handful of words but knew them well and shouted at the top of his lungs at all times. “Daddy _up_!” and “Lance no” seemed to be his favorites. The constant interruptions annoyed Lance to no end, and he kept getting up to chase Mateo from the room, calling out to his parents that Mateo was being annoying.

“I can’t watch Star Trek with Keith!” Lance protested when his mother tried to tell him to play nice with his brother. “Mateo keeps getting in the way.”

As a matter of fact, Mateo had flopped down on the floor beside Keith and was showing him a brightly-colored plastic truck that seemed to be his favorite, which _was_ pretty distracting, but Keith didn’t mind so much. He hadn’t had any siblings except for the Hollis kids, who didn’t really count. Neither of them had ever bothered to play with Keith.

But Keith didn’t complain when Lance’s mother, frowning at her oldest son, picked up Mateo and carried him from the room.

“Ugh.” Lance flopped onto his stomach where Mateo had been. “Sorry ‘bout my brother,” he said, wrinkling his nose at the word _brother_ like he was talking about a hairy wart on the bottom of his foot. “He’s so annoying.”

“He’s not so bad,” Keith said, stretching out next to Lance and looking up at the TV screen. He’d brought the Spock action figure Lance had given him and fiddled with it as he waited for Lance to argue.

But Lance stayed quiet, and when Keith finally risked a glance over, Lance was smiling to himself, quietly spinning the wheels on Mateo’s toy truck. Catching Keith’s look, Lance ducked his head, flushing.

“You really like him?”

Keith shrugged. He thought it would be weird to say that he liked being here, where it felt like the McClains were actually a family and not just a bunch of people living together. Where the smell of warm cookies drifted out from the oven and the pictures on the walls were candid and happy, instead of the fakey posed portraits Brian and Kim had of them and their daughter, who was off at college and getting married soon.

This house felt lived in, and Keith wished Lance’s parents could have been his foster parents. He thought it would be a lot easier to come home to a mom who made her son cookies and a dad who ruffled his son’s hair and told him to have fun with his friend.

But all Keith said was, “It’s cool he wants to play with you.”

“Yeah,” Lance said. “I guess.”

“Maybe… we could play trucks with him after Star Trek?”

Lance smiled, bright and pleased. “Yeah! He’d like that. Maybe before dinner?”

They did, and Mateo fell asleep on Keith’s lap while Lance was racing two trucks on the far side of the room. When Lance noticed, he started to try to wake Mateo up, but Keith wouldn’t let him. They sat together on the playroom floor whispering about Star Trek and all the adventures Kirk and Spock would get up to if Keith and Lance were in charge of the show, until Lance’s dad called them down to dinner.

* * *

“Hey, Lance! I got your lion back.”

Lance, handcuffed to a tree on an alien moon, thought Keith’s voice at that moment was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard. “Thank you, Keith,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound too emotional. “Now can you come and unchain me?”

“What was that? I, uh, you’re cutting out. I can’t—I can’t hear you.” There was a wicked smirk in Keith’s voice, familiar and thrilling, and Lance’s breath drained out of him.

_But you’re Spock! And Spock would never leave Kirk behind!_

_He would if Kirk was being stupid._

Lance shut the door on the memories. “Oh, come on,” he said dryly. “I thought we bonded. Keith? Buddy? My man?”

Lance played up the plaintive tone, begging Keith to come rescue him with big puppy eyes Keith couldn’t see and a whine in his voice that made Keith laugh. (It had always made Keith laugh, and Lance was glad to see that not _everything_ had changed.)

The worst thing was how familiar it felt, how much like second grade. Easy bickering, playing pretend, playing Kirk-and-Spock, Lance charging off into danger with Keith at his side even though the real Spock should have had more sense than that. But somehow Keith always seemed to disappear just before the scraped knees and parental scoldings, then came back with his smug smirk and teasing voice to lecture Lance about thinking things through.

And it hurt, the familiarity. The way they fell so easily back into old rhythms. The way Keith _still_ didn’t remember.

So when Keith showed up and cut through the handcuffs with his bayard, Lance kept his mouth clamped shut and said nothing, not even a thank you, until they were back with the others. Keith was observant enough to notice, and he seemed to shrink, hesitant to push harder and drive more of a wedge between them.

This would have been so much easier if he’d just _remembered._

But he didn’t remember, and Hunk was still insistent that they get back to the Balmera and help Shay, so Lance sucked it up and did his job. They took out the surface forces before heading deeper into the Balmera, and Lance tried not to let his disappointment show when he was paired up with Keith.

They stood together on a rocky ledge overlooking the main Galra hangar, where all their fighters were housed. Lance scanned the room, weighing his options, but Keith was not so patient.

“The whole hangar’s only being guarded by a few sentries,” he whispered, summoning his bayard. “Let’s go.”

“Woah, woah, woah!” Lance had to grab him by the collar to stop him running off to get himself killed. “Cool your jets, Keith! Don’t you remember that stuff about this Balmera thing being a sensitive animal?”

Keith scowled at him, as petulant at eighteen as he’d been at seven, and even more prickly about being touched. Lance quickly let go, and Keith finally seemed to process what Lance had said. “Oh. Right.”

“We can’t just go around blowing things up.”

“What, like you have a better idea?”

“I do.” Smiling, Lance crouched down and pointed toward the booth overlooking the hangar. “We sneak into that control room and shut down the bay doors. That’ll trap the ships in.”

“That--” Keith stopped himself, anger melting away into shock. “Actually is a better idea.”

Call him ungracious, but Lance couldn’t help the self-satisfied smile growing on his face as he led the way toward the booth, muttering, “I can’t believe I ever thought _you_ were Spock.”

There was a moment of silence, Keith’s feet scuffing against the rock as he slowed. Then: “What did you just say?”

Lance’s heart hammered in his chest. He didn’t want to turn, didn’t want to see the recognition on Keith’s face—or worse, more of the same blank confusion. But Keith grabbed him by the elbow, and Lance turned, throat too thick to speak, even if he’d been able to find the words.

Their eyes met, and Keith recoiled.

“ _You_?”

* * *

Keith always regretted not saying goodbye to Lance.

They had one year—ten months, really—of recesses and swapping lunches and Star Trek dates and playing trucks with Mateo and running all over the neighborhood with flagrant disregard for the Prime Directive. Keith could have stayed in La Quinta forever and been perfectly happy.

So of course it was then, two weeks into his summer vacation and just coming home from a pool party he’d gone to with Lance and some of the other kids from school, that Keith heard the news: An aunt—his mother’s sister, who Keith had never even met—had come out of the shadows and decided she suddenly wanted to foster her dear darling nephew.

(Keith wouldn’t last much longer with her than he did with any of his other foster placements.)

Kim and Brian had a week’s notice; Keith, just five days.

They told him he could say goodbye to his friends, but it was summer, so saying goodbye would have meant going to Lance’s house with his perfect parents and his perfect siblings and the smell of cookies in the air and the pictures laughing at him on the wall.

Keith spent five days shut up in his room except when he had to eat or use the bathroom, and then he left La Quinta for Anaheim and a stuffy little apartment that smelled like Aunt Hana’s mothballs and Uncle Theo’s cigarettes.

Years passed, and at first Keith thought of Lance often. He kept the Spock action figure through four foster homes, long after the colors had begun to rub off, until it was lost somewhere between the group home he’d been in for eight months when he was fourteen and placement number seven.

Eventually the parade of new faces and new friends (short-lived though they might be) and new schools and new neighbors wore away at his memory of the kid from La Quinta who’d given him a Spock action figure. He’d never been good with names and faces, and he’d memorized enough—before he gave up on making friends altogether—to crowd out everything that had come before.

He always remembered Captain Kirk, though. His best friend, and one of his last. He liked to think one day after he aged out he’d make his way back to La Quinta and see if his feet remembered the way to that perfect stuccoed house by the pizza parlor.

* * *

Lance was good at deflection. Always had been. When you had two nosy little siblings trying to listen in on phone calls with your crushes or _about_ your crushes, you learned to be discreet.

So he wiped away Keith’s wide-eyed, half-formed questions with a quick reminder that they were on a tight schedule here, and they managed to finish saving Shay and her people without any awkward questions getting in the way.

Deflection didn’t help him very much when they made it back to the castle and Keith cornered him in the hallway outside his bedroom.

“Lance,” Keith said. There was an unusual weight to the name, like Keith hadn’t ever listened to what he was saying before now. His eyes, familiar dark blue eyes—almost violet if the light was right—searched Lance’s face. “ _Lance._ That was your name.”

The lump in Lance’s throat dissolved. “Yeah,” he said, letting his hurt and his anger get the best of him. “Yeah, congratulations, mullet, that’s my name.”

Shocked, Keith pulled back, his brows pulling together—and _damn_ , Lance wished he didn’t know exactly what that meant. _Why are you doing this?_ that look said. _What did I do wrong?_

Lance spun around so he didn’t have to look at Keith’s wounded face. “Well, hey, it’s nice to know you care, I guess. Only took you two years to remember me.”

“Lance, I--” Keith swore, softly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you. It’s been so long--”

“Yeah, it has.” Lance spun, hating the way his chest felt tight, hating that he had to work so hard to keep his anger up. He jabbed his thumb into his own chest. “But _I_ remembered you, Keith. I knew you the _second_ I saw you. You were my best friend! How can you forget something like that?”

Keith was getting defensive now, which was good. Let him yell. Lance didn’t want to feel sorry for him. He _wanted_ to be angry. He _wanted_ to yell and complain and hit Keith where it hurt, because that was a hell of a lot better than hurting himself.

Lance knew the second Keith fell fully into _fight_ mode from the way his jaw slid fractionally to one side.

“It’s been a long time, _Lance_ ,” he growled. “I’ve met a lot of people since we were seven, okay? I’m sorry you’re not the special snowflake you like to think you are.”

He spun on his heel and headed towards his room, stomping his feel like _he_ was the victim here. Lance followed after, adrenaline building in his chest.

“Oh, real nice, Kogane. Run away, just like you always do.” Lance stuck his hand out to catch Keith’s door as he tried to close it in Lance’s face. (Maybe not his best idea, but as it turned out, the castle-ship’s doors were programed not to crush any misplaced appendages.) “You could have at least _told_ me.”

Keith froze, his back to Lance, his body rigid.

Lance pushed on the half-open door and it retracted, letting him into Keith’s room. “You just _vanished_. We were supposed to hang out and you just...” He lifted his arms, then let them drop, helpless. The door hissed shut, sealing them off in the quiet stuffiness of Keith’s room. “You never showed up. My parents said you’d gone to live with your aunt.”

The question in his voice made Keith flinch, and some of the tension bled out of him. He turned, looking as crumpled as the dirty clothes scattered around his room, and stared at Lance’s hands.

“I didn’t exactly have a choice.”

“What do you mean?”

Keith lifted one hand and pulled the other arm close against his side. “I was in the system,” he said, and Lance felt suddenly like a complete jerk. “I wanted to stay in La Quinta, but Aunt Hana was a blood relative, so the state decided I’d be better off with her. I didn’t have time to figure out how to tell you before I got dragged off to live with her.”

“Oh.”

Keith looked up, and Lance was struck by how vulnerable he looked, like a seven-year-old kid showing up two weeks into the school year with too-long hair and a hand-me-down backpack and just the slightest show of fear as a horde of rabid second graders swarmed him to hand out compulsory greetings.

“Oh,” Lance said again, then sat down on the bed. “Did you at least like it with your aunt, I hope?”

Keith sat beside him, spinning that knife of his in restless hands. “Yeah, right. She wanted to do something for her dead sister, then realized she was terrible with kids and foisted me off on some poor, unsuspecting schmucks in the world’s shittiest game of hot potato.”

There was bitterness there that Lance didn’t know what to do with, so he watched the motion of Keith’s knife and thought about the kid who’d played Star Trek with him.

“How many?”

Keith turned his head. “How many what?”

“Foster homes.” Lance paused. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want.”

“Eight. Plus a couple months in a group home.”

Lance swore, and Keith laughed weakly.

“You know, none of them ever felt as much like _home_ as your place.”

Lance almost choked on his own tongue. The motion of Keith’s knife stopped, and when Lance managed to look up, Keith was watching him.

“So… How’s your family been?”

When Keith had cornered him, Lance had been expecting anger, frustration, maybe a punch or two. Righteous anger and stubborn pride had carried him this far—so the tears caught him entirely off guard.

Flailing, Keith reached out to comfort Lance, then changed his mind and backed to the very foot of the bed. “Sorry! Shit, sorry. I’m—I didn’t mean to upset you.”

A laugh, helpless and hysterical, bubbled out of Lance. “Good to know you’re still just as bad at comforting people as you were back then.”

Keith blushed a furious red and, very cautiously, stretched out a hand toward Lance. “Sorry. Can I--?”

Lance snaked his hand out, too fast for Keith to react, and intertwined their fingers. “It’s okay,” he said, taking a long, shaky breath. He swiped at his tears with his free hand and smiled. (He’d always been better than Keith at reassurance, he thought wryly, even when he was the one crying.) “Just—I’ve been trying not to think about home. Guess it was worse than I thought.”

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Rolling his eyes, Lance tugged Keith closer. “You apologize too much, mullet.”

The wary, deer-in-the-headlights look faded to a scowl, and Keith punched Lance in the shoulder. “Watch it, cargo pilot.”

Lance grinned. “They’re good, though. The family. Mateo’s starting high school next year.”

“ _What?_ Your _brother_? The one we raced toy cars with?”

“Right? I can’t believe it either! Where does he get off, growing up like that?” Lance chuckled and flopped backward across the bed. His fingers, still linked with Keith’s, pulled Keith down beside him. “Luz—my sister, she was just a baby when you were in La Quinta—she’s eleven now. Tough little cockroach, too. You’d like her.”

“I’ll have to come see them when we get back.”

A thrill went through Lance, shivery and bright, and he turned to Keith, too shocked to keep his face blank. Keith blushed.

Lance lifted Keith’s hand and kissed his knuckles.

He would blame it, later, on exhaustion from the battle over the Balmera and homesickness making him emotional and Keith being altogether too _Keith_ and making him do impulsive, reckless things he otherwise would have talked himself out of.

As it was, he froze with his lips still pressed against Keith’s skin, his eyes going wide as he caught Keith’s expression—just as startled and just as frozen as Lance’s.

Dropping Keith’s hand, Lance shot upright and covered his face, doing his best to stifle a scream.

“Oh my god,” he whispered, horrified and elated. “I can’t believe I just did that.”

A soft laugh interrupted him, growing quickly to something loose and infectious that won out over Lance’s mortification.

“I hope this is a laughing _with_ me, not _at_ me sort of thing,” Lance said, his petulance ruined somewhat by the self-conscious laughter he couldn’t quite stave off.

Keith waved one hand, red-faced, and rolled onto his side. He parted the fingers on the hand still covering his face and grinned up at Lance. “Sorry,” he said, biting his lip to smother his giggles. “I was just thinking about how ironic it is that I’d find my Captain Kirk in space.”

Lance laughed so hard Keith kicked him in the shin with a grumpy frown weakened by a fierce blush.

“Sorry,” Lance said, squeezing Keith’s hands. “Hey. You want to go kick the Prime Directives in the balls with me?”

Keith arched an eyebrow. “What did you have in mind?”

“See what’s up with Pidge’s secret research bunker down in the Green Lion’s hangar?”

“You’re going to get yourself electrocuted,” Keith warned, but he was grinning. “Let’s go.”


End file.
